CityLab Daily: The Decade the City Became the App Store

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Get smart: The smartphone—and the millions of apps that followed it—will go down as one of the most transformative technologies of the 2010s. And one of the primary agents for that transformation has been the city. Some of that change is plain for the eye to see: Companies like Uber, Instagram, Google Maps, and Airbnb have reshaped how we travel through and experience cities. Some of it is by its very nature hidden: Seemingly every object on the street can be made “smart” simply by gathering digital data to crunch, while the phones in our pockets tell companies where demand could go next.